1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relate to the field of medical imaging and more particularly that of radiology, being applied to the field of vascular radiological interventional imaging.
2. Description of Related Art
Vascular interventional radiology includes procedures conducted under the control of imaging and treats myocardial ischaemia in particular.
Myocardial ischaemia is an illness affecting over a third of people in developed countries and it manifests via stenosis, that is, shrinking of an artery.
There are several treatments, including insertion of intra-coronary stents, for treating this illness.
For this, a cardiologist utilizes interventional imaging which offers him characterization of possible lesions and quantification of coronary arteries and, more particularly, stenoses for selecting the dimensions of the stent to be introduced.
The cardiologist normally uses an image of the zone including an artery to be treated on which he manually positions several markers along the artery to be treated to conduct stenosis analysis, that is, to determine the place where stenosis is located and to determine the dimensions of the stent necessary for treatment of the stenosis.
This detection and quantification require interaction of the radiologist with a medical imaging device and a previous step of detection of the artery to be treated.
The disadvantage here is that detection and quantification take time and are difficult to execute for the practitioner.